Quick access to a reliable forecast is important for reasons beyond simply having some fall-back material during lulls in everyday conversation. Knowing what the weather has in store for your location can guide wardrobe decisions and help you decide on whether that picnic should be postponed to a drier day.

There are plenty of websites that offer accurate forecasts, and even Google can give you a quick-look at your location’s weather with a simple search query. Living Earth HD for Mac aims to keep you up-to-date on weather conditions without having to open your browser. Is it ready to replace your local weatherman?

Bored of your iTunes music? Want more music without paying for a subscription to any of the new online music services? Then you need to get a copy of Radium 3, our sponsor this week.

Radium is the Mac app for serious internet radio listeners. It’s beautifully designed, simple to use, and filled with over 8,000 stations of every genre so you’ll always have something to listen to. Just search for the type of music you feel like listening to, and get back to what you’re doing. Radium will stream the music, let you easily see what’s playing in your menubar, and keep a list of your favorites so you can buy them from iTunes later. It’s great.

If you take your internet radio seriously, then you’ll want the best audio quality possibly. Radium makes that easy, with a built-in equalizer, and support for AirPlay to send music to your wireless speakers or Apple TV. It’ll let you share the songs you like with your social networks, find the currently playing song on iTunes, and even lets you subscribe to premium radio stations if you want. It’s everything you could want from an internet radio player app, and it works great.

For the past five years, I’ve been relying upon FileMaker’s Bento to manage structured data on my MacBook. Unfortunately, the Apple subsidiary recently announced that it was ending development of the friendly database application. The company will stop selling Bento after September 2013, and will end user support after July 2014.

It’s time for a new simple databasing app for the Mac. In this review, I’ll be looking at an indie database app called Tap Forms to see how it stacks up as a Bento replacement. It looks promising — and hopefully it can eventually take the Bento crown. (more…)

Marketcircle’s Billings was discontinued in June 2013 in favour of their subscription-based Billings Pro, an app which we’ve reviewed and think is awesome. Subscription-based software isn’t for everyone, however, and we’ve been frequently asked to recommend some alternative apps to Billings Pro that doesn’t require any recurring costs.

If you’re looking for an invoicing or time tracking app to replace Billings, or perhaps simply want to know what’s out there, here’s the 10 best simple time tracking and invoicing apps on the Mac today.

I do a fair bit of photo editing — everything from screenshots to engagement and wedding shoots — and there are some things that take way too long to do in Photoshop or any of its equivalents. One of those things is collages. Another one is setting up a background image.

In Photoshop, you’d have to create a background layer, adjust the colour, adjust the size of your next layer, and drag them around until it fit right. That’s great if you’re really particular and know exactly what you’re looking to do. But sometimes, you just want a really cool and quick way to show off your weekend at the beach. And you want it to take about ten seconds from conception to Facebook sensation. This is where Diptic comes in.

We just closed our giveaway; congrats to our winners Bob, Alex, and Lauritz!

Frustrated with all the blank music note covers on your albums? Combine that with messed up song info, and it can be terribly hard to find that song you’re looking for. If it’s easier to go grab the original CD than it is to find the song in iTunes, you need help. And that’s what TuneUp is for. It’s the iTunes plugin that’ll cleanup your library, adding album art and song metadata and getting rid of duplicate tracks in just one click with the just-released TuneUp 3. It’ll analyze your library, organize everything in easy-to-understand graphs about your music library, and make you wish you’d taken it for a spin sooner.

We called it “a great timesaver if, like most of us, your iTunes library is a mess” in our review, and that still holds true today — even more so with the revamped latest version.

TuneUp usually costs $49.95 for a lifetime license, but we’ve got 3 lifetime licenses of TuneUp 3 just for our readers this week. Sound like something you’d like to get your hands on? Then just leave a comment below and let us know how big your iTunes library is to get your entry in our giveaway. If you’d like an extra entry in the giveaway, just share this post on your favorite social network and add another comment below with a link to your post.

Hurry and get your entry in; we’ll close the giveaway on Friday, August 23rd. Oh, and for the record: my iTunes library currently weighs in at just over 6.2Gb, with around 1100 songs.

Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.

MainStage has long been Apple’s answer to the live music performance industry. While the company hasn’t listed names of popular bands who use the app (like they did with Logic Pro), there are quite a few artists who use the concert-optimized DAW for synthesizers and sometimes even mixing. I’ve been using the second version of MainStage to play synths at church for over three years now, and while it was a learning process to understand things, I’m fully invested in the app now, and I love it.

When I saw MainStage 3, I was excited to see new features like arpeggiators and drum machines finally making their way to the app. The sparkly user interface, too, looked like a nice change. After a bit of testing, I’ve come to a few conclusions about the app. Let’s go over them. (more…)

MacBooks might look nice in their original boxes from Apple, but it’s not very practical to carry them around in the original box all the time. And you’d really, really better not carry around your MacBook on its own. That just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

So what should you do? Why, you’ll need to get a nice case for your MacBook. Whether you’re still carrying a thick MacBook Pro, or have switched to the slim MacBook Air, you’ll need at least protection for your Mac, and at most a place to put all of your cables and papers and more. There’s a ton of different bags out there, so we’ve rounded up our team’s favorites.

Here’s the MacBook bags, backpacks, sleeves and more that the AppStorm team uses.

AirPlay is a fantastic feature if you want to listen to a podcast wirelessly on your home speakers or watch a film that’s available only on Amazon Prime Video (which is not included with the Apple TV). However, it is missing one feature: the ability to stream from your iPhone to your Mac, rather than a TV. This could be handy if you use your iMac as a TV and want to play your movies and games on the big screen, or don’t want to take your iPhone out of your pocket to listen to a podcast while in the coffee shop (because you didn’t buy Instacast on both platforms).

There has long been a solution available, properly titled AirServer. The thing is, we never got around to reviewing it here at Mac.AppStorm, so today I’m going to do just that. Is the little utility worth the price and does it do everything that’s promised? (more…)

We all love our Macs, but for many, business realities often mean that you can’t use them for your work. Perhaps your company is already standardized on another OS, and the IT department won’t let you bring your own Mac. Or perhaps you have to use older software or hardware that won’t work on a Mac. I’m always amazed how often I still see Windows XP and even DOS in use at companies, and even spotted the latter running on a cash register computer at a Mac retailer recently.

Then, there’s others that use another platform on purpose. Perhaps you like developing on Linux, even if you love the apps and design of the Mac. Or — like myself — perhaps you use a tablet for your on-the-go computing and a Modbook Pro never really made sense for you. So, you find yourself using iOS or Android instead of OS X for your work.

Whatever the reason, we’d love to hear what other platform you use the most. Don’t include what you use on your phone — we’re mostly still not using our phones as alternate computers, however powerful they are today — but feel free to select iOS or Android if you use a tablet for a significant part of your computing life.